Tommy’s Honour sounds like a dream Donald Trump might have had, of the halcyon early days of golf in Scotland, when the St Andrews links course was a rugged wilderness and the landed aristocracy netted all the winnings. He wouldn’t like the way it plays out.

This is a biopic of father-and-son golf legends – mere caddies by station, whose achievements shaped the game as it’s played today. It’s about native talent rising to the top without a silver spoon in sight.

As the latest directing project for Jason Connery, it’s a film with distinctly personal things to say about filling your father’s boots. Sean is not cast in the role of Old Tommy Morris – that job falls to a bristling, bearded Peter Mullan – but the old kilt-wearing tax exile strays into your thoughts from time to time. Generally recognised as golf’s founding father, Old Tommy launched the Open Championship in 1860, and was the first man ever to tee off for it at Prestwick.

Ultimate distinction as a player, though, fell instead to his son, Young Tommy (Jack Lowden), who won the tournament three times in a row, starting at just 17, and still holds the record as the youngest winner of a major trophy. Where his father dropped games repeatedly once getting to the green, Young Tommy putted like a dream, and was no slouch on the approach shots, either: call him Baby Driver.

It probably takes a golf fan to get the most out of Tommy’s Honour, but only because the film dotingly engages with the history of the sport, underlining innovative play from both Morrises like a trusty commentator. It doesn’t stint on local colour: there’s a lot of knocking back hip-flasks between shots and striding purposefully across the Highlands to keep those tourist-brochure credentials intact.

Jack Lowden and Ophelia Lovibond

The husband-and-wife team Pamela Marin and Kevin Cook contributed the rock-solid script, from Cook’s book about Morris père and fils. There was a risk of buying into a certain boysy, clubhouse chauvinism which is nicely satirised instead, especially when Young Tommy meets the love of his life.

Lowden, a vaunted London stage star soon to be seen in Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk, knows how to invest his role with a boyish impetuosity without overdoing the naïveté, and stands up squarely to St Andrews’s boss-captain (a genteel Sam Neill). But it’s his chemistry with Ophelia Lovibond which seals the deal.

Jack Lowden and Peter Mullan

She’s excellent as Meg, the future wife over whom Tommy would fall out with his devout Christian mother (Therese Bradley), because of a bastard child on the village ledger. The two women get one scene together, and it’s a cracker.

Through it all, Mullan is a reliable bedrock of grumpy stoicism, as perfect as ever at locking his feelings away to seep out in close-up when the time is right. A fateful contretemps between Morrises, involving a telegram delivered three shots shy of victory, leaves their relationship hanging in the balance through the last reel: whether the killer putt goes in or not is of much less import than whether forgiveness can ever follow.

The film’s no hole in one, but given the level of cringe that could have been possible, you’d have to chalk it up as a very dignified par.